


It takes at least thirty days.

by kiiouex



Series: monotony [1]
Category: Don't Starve (Video Game)
Genre: Death, Implied Non-Con, M/M, POV Second Person, Starvation, Strangulation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-11
Updated: 2015-09-11
Packaged: 2018-04-20 07:22:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4778555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s snow underfoot and you’re getting colder. There are so many bones buried in the earth, but still no sign of another live survivor.  </p>
<p>You haven't figured out Maxwell's game yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It takes at least thirty days.

**Author's Note:**

> it's not my fault [telekinesiskid](http://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid) put me up to it (but the research was fun)
> 
> Please enjoy this horrible story

The rabbits aren’t taking the bait.

There weren’t that many carrots around to begin with and watching them rot under your traps is agony. You’ve tried to calculate how long you can leave them, when the chance of getting a bit of meat won’t be worth the risk of losing the little food you have now, but it’s hard to think straight with your stomach so empty.

You’ve only been on the island a few days, and your most generous estimates of your chances only give you a few more. Winter is harsh, snow is deep, food is scarce. The effort of chopping trees exhausts you, drains the reserves of strength you need to scavenge, leaves you too hungry to get as much wood the next day. A night without a fire would be death, but you’re in poor shape, checking your traps desperately whenever you return from trees and trying to warm your ragged hands in your armpits in between.

The only reason you lasted more than one night was the good luck you had on the first day, finding a skeleton half-buried in snow and the unfortunate’s tools scattered around him. An axe, a backpack, a few pieces of gold and murky globs of rotten food. The spine had been crushed, shattered edges leaving an imprint of some huge creature’s foot, and you have been on guard for such a monster ever since. You can’t tell why the skeleton had one hand deep in the dirt, and the other wrapped around a pinecone. It seems such a ridiculous action to be taking in the face of death, but you can’t write the man off as a loon when he did so much better than you. The workmanship on the backpack you took is immaculate, the axe sturdy.

Finding the skeleton is the only piece of luck you have had since Maxwell dumped you here. You wonder how many others he brings to this island, what sick delight he must take in watching so many struggle against his world. You wonder if you’re ever going to meet one of your fellow prisoners _before_ they die, but so far you’ve found nothing but rotting corpses and bones.

You eat the carrots. They’re mushy from exposure and taste like they were boiled in vinegar. You regret all your choices bitterly, but there’s no use feeling bad now. You pack up your traps and tell yourself at least you learned something, and frustration roils in your gut alongside rotten vegetables.

You wander. The wood you cut is heavy on your back but what you might find could be worth the effort to travel – and it’s another risk, you’re doing so poorly on those so far but it beats sitting near your tree stumps and waiting for death – and you head north in erratic steps. The carrots make you feel sick, and your body aches, your head is hazy.

‘Survival skills’ was never a topic of interest to you, but you know a little biology, know you might be too hungry to feel thirst. You scoop a handful of snow into your mouth and it shivers down your throat before you remember you ought to melt it first. Your hindsight is remarkably clear, and all these belated thoughts are going to kill you. You chalk it down to ‘lesson learned’ once again, and try to ignore the ice pooled in your belly as you move on.

The world in inhospitable, and you trudge over frozen dirt, scanning the ground of anything you could eat, anything you can use. You skirt the edges of a swamp, seeing white bones sticking up from the iced-over mud. These ones don’t form a skeleton; they’re scattered around and shattered, like the body was ripped apart. It’s enough of a warning.

There’s a hint of rot when you enter a forest, but no obvious source. The trees are either snow-laden or bare, nothing you feel eager enough to tackle, and you strip some bushes instead, feeling plant fibres and bark try to rub your hands raw. You need the resources, though, and only stop when your palms are bloody.  

You keep on through the woods, and the rotten smell gets stronger, more rancid, and you follow it just to find the source; if some big creature died, maybe you can catch some scavengers. It hits you proper when you find a clearing, the ashes of a campfire, the corpse. It’s human.

You’ve found remains before, plenty of times, but this body is fresh, barely bloated, preserved by the snow.  Nature is beginning to work on it, but the flesh is almost completely intact, it can’t have been out for more than a few days. Curious, you creep closer because you’ve never seen such proof that other people have actually been here and that the island isn’t an elaborate graveyard.

It’s naked. You can see every injury, every scratch and bite the body bears. The skin still clinging tight to the ribcage. The heavy black bruises around the neck. On the thighs. It’s lying on its back and you try to stay calm, empirical, as you creep a little closer to look at the face. Mouth open, eyes frozen, a black eye and a handprint on the cheek, pale with odd red blotches from where the blood has pooled.

Disgusting, deformed, and somehow the spitting image of you.

You don’t look at the face for more than the second it takes you to realise before you reel back from it – from your corpse.  You gag worthlessly onto the snow but your stomach is too empty to bring anything up but an acrid burn. Bile comes bitter to your throat and everything seems to be spinning as you try to _reject_ it, because it’s not possible, you have never been here before, you have never been strangled to death in a winter forest. But that is your own dead body lying in front of you. You look away from the face, trying to see just anything else and instead your eyes light upon the deep impressions of fingers bruising the hips. You retch. 

The world seems to darken around you as you stare at the snow under you and struggle to calm yourself.  It is a moment before you can think again, and you spit out a sour mouthful as you sit up. Your eyes are overflowing and you wipe hot tears away because night will be falling soon and if you don’t want to die – don’t want to end up _like that_ – then there are still things to do, a fire to be lit, wood and food to gather. You are a scientist, you tell yourself, and clench your hands tight to still them.

Its old clothes are a few meters away, and you can see they’re ripped, bloodied. You think you should take them, you can salvage some of the fabric, but you don’t. The other supplies are scattered around, nothing very useful but you collect a few bits of flint gratefully enough. The food has been carried off by scavengers, but you don’t feel hungry as you leave.

Night falls faster every day, and though you want to put as much distance between yourself and _that_ as you can, your body disagrees with your mind, tired and weak and drags you down. You light a campfire, settle down before it, wish you had something to cook or eat or build just to keep your hands busy. Instead you get to sit in your little clearing, watch the light barely cover a meter from the loose pile of logs you managed, and try not to pick shapes out of the darkness beyond.

The fire seems weak, no matter how much wood you stack onto it, and for all that it’s warm, you can’t stop shivering. You’ve been trying to find alternate scenarios to make things make sense, but they’re all ridiculous, implausible, impossible. The body cannot be yours, because you are not _resurrecting_. You’re exhausted and starving, and the world is getting more malignant by the second, but you can’t have died here before. It’s a trick of Maxwell’s to trip you up, surely. Your fingers are drumming against your knee, counting themselves over and over, and you sit on them to quell it.

It has been far too long since you last slept, but you don’t trust your fire to hold the dark at bay without your tending. And since you found your- _the_ body, the world seems to have gotten so much worse – it can’t just be in your head, the darkness outside the firelight is restless, shadows seeming to solidify and crawl out of the night, vanishing when they near your flame. Your only recourse is to sit closer to the light, but you can’t help staring out into the darkness, over-tired mind trying to find something real inside.

You don’t expect to see anything but shades and apparitions, but there’s a cold whisper of wind pushing through the real, tangible shadows, and you see the gleam of your fire reflected in someone’s eyes. You’ve _felt_ like that shadows are watching you, but it’s only now in the weird, pale and warped version of the world that you can make out a face.

You grab your axe, haul yourself upright, try not to wobble too visibly because maybe whatever it is can’t tell what poor shape you’re in. “Who’s there?” You demand of the shadows, and you try to sound intimidating but it just comes out tired. “Show yourself.”

There’s a glint of teeth, and the face glides forwards. It’s not until they step into the clearing that you can actually separate their suit from the shadows, and then you realise you’re glaring up at _Maxwell_ , Maxwell with his horrible grin and neat red corsage, Maxwell who does not look like he’s been clinging to his life in the wilderness for the last few days, Maxwell who is too tall and too lean and no longer seems human.

“Hey, pal,” he says, and there is such an air of confidence about him, his total ease with this nightmare world, and it sets your teeth on edge. “See something you didn’t like?”

“It’s some trick of yours,” you say, and you don’t step back from him when he takes another step forwards but oh, you want to. “It’s not real, and I’m not falling for it.”

“No?” he says, lips curling with amusement. “I thought all the little crafts you left lying with your bones might have tipped you off, but even after such fresh, _solid_ proof, you won’t believe in the obvious truth?”

“A trick,” you repeat, but your voice wavers with your convictions.

He steps forwards again, and he’s too much taller than you, you have to step back even though it makes him grin. “You’ve been here more than once, buddy, whether you want to acknowledge that or not. It’s not my fault you don’t remember; I’m kind enough to keep bringing you back!”

Every skeleton you have seen has been about your size. It would be such a pointlessly elaborate farce, and if it is a farce what is the goal, to unnerve you? The corpse was yours, and you take the revelation better this time, you stay calm even as your fists clench. “How,” you start, but your mouth is too dry, you have to pause and swallow and try again, “How many times have I died?”

“You’ve been killed by spiders about a dozen times, pigmen five and beefalo three,” he says, counting them off on his slender fingers. “My hounds have done you in a few times, too, Treeguards twice, and your fire went out and fed you to Charlie once. The shadows got you a few times after you spent too long playing in wormholes, and I lost count of how many times you decided to eat the purple, slimy meat you pulled out of monsters. Starvation – you’ve never actually lived long enough to starve.”

He’s grinning like it’s hilarious to him, and you realise that if what he’s saying is true – and you know you just _want_ to reject it, you’re getting ready to accept that the world is actually littered with your remains – then he has watched you die, over and over. He has chosen to laugh about every time you have been crushed or clawed or devoured, and then bring you back so he can watch you die again.

And you – you’ve made the same mistakes, so many times? You’ve wandered through this nightmare world and struggled and tried to adapt, but every time you die you lose everything you’ve learned. There’s no record beside bones, brittle white warnings for you to guess at. It’s insulting, and you think the truth is settling on you fully because you begin to feel _indignant_ at the awful joy Maxwell must take at your apparently endless blundering ignorance.  

You really do not doubt that he enjoys it. You think of the bruises pressed deep into the corpse you found, the ones on the throat, the ones on the hips, heavy marks left by human hands. You have to ask; “How many times have you killed me?”

His smile is too wide, teeth unnaturally numerous. The fire got low while you were talking, the light doesn’t reach his eyes anymore. “Only a few,” he says, voice oozing into your ears. “But I’ve got to say, pal, it’s pretty fun.”

You recognise the words as a warning but you’re too tired, too slow. You lash out with the axe but it’s a wide swing and he sidesteps it easily, sweeping up before you and grabbing you tight around the neck. You kick and struggle and pull desperately at his arms, but it seems no effort for him to lift you up off the ground as his hands curl around your neck and squeeze.

He has such long fingers and they press in tight around your neck, on a jugular first before he reconsiders and adjusts his grip to crush your windpipe. You know it will hurt more and take longer that way, and you lash out with everything you can but you can’t kick him well enough, your hands might as well be shoving at steel. His hold is constricting, crushing, the already fragile grip you had on the world weakening that bit more. The darkness is terrifying, it’s closing in around the campfire and now inside your head as well, shutting off the world until it’s your own heart beating a frantic staccato and your lungs beginning to sputter.

 “This is about the worst run you’ve ever had,” he says, and he sounds so delighted by your failings, “Dying after a handful of days! You’ve been pathetic, really pal, I’m doing you a favour, giving you a nice fresh start. Maybe you can last a week this time!”

His fingers feel like they’re pressing through your skin, indenting so deep it’s a wonder they don’t just puncture your neck, let you bleed out faster. Your hands are going limp against his arm and your pulse is pounding in your head, everything woozy and off-kilter as he starves you of oxygen.

All your dying brain can think is how _unfair_ this is, that you’re going to come back and you won’t even know. You claw vainly at his arm, but you’re too weak to put any force into it and he grins horribly at your efforts.

“Tell you what, buddy,” he says suddenly, and the choking grip eases just a little, lets you gasp and struggle and draw in just a sliver of air to wheeze on. “I’ll give you a choice! When I bring you back, do you want to start out around here, so you can stumble over all your old failures and figure this out again? Or do you want me to put you down far away, so you can get on with surviving, so you won’t have to know how many times you’ve fucked this up already?”

Your words come out a miserable hiss of air, and Maxwell relaxes his grip a little further to let you answer. Through a trembling exhalation, you manage to force out the words, “I want to remember.”

His smirk slips a little. “You want to _remember_? This?”

“Every time,” you wheeze.

He gets it, and he _laughs_ , the worst sound in the night. “You want all your incarnations in your head? All your deaths? That’s the kind of thing that drives people mad, pal, and you’ve got a shaky enough grasp on sanity as it is. So, _sure_ ,” he says, the embers of your fire crackling in his eyes as he forces his thumbs back down on your throat, “you can start remembering.”

You thrash in his grip, legs kicking the air until you finally still, Maxwell’s wicked grin chasing you out of the world.

You wake choking and gasping desperately for breathe, and it is a long moment before your body realises it can breathe clearly, your windpipe is clear. You realise you’re in a familiar grassy field, and you check your throat gingerly for bruises that you don’t find. Your stomach isn’t hollow. The skin on your hands is smooth, unbroken. There’s a shadow looming over you, but it leaves without speaking. Apparently, Maxwell has decided he doesn’t need to taunt you on arrival anymore.

You already know what he would have said. 


End file.
